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I get an odd
feeling when playing old Spectrum games. It's like talking to the past.
Whether it's because computer games are immediately interactive, or just
because they have flashing coloured lights and bleeps, they seem more
alive to me than other antiques. I feel nothing when I see an old car,
or a painting, and reading through my 1968 copy of Alistair MacLean's
'Where Eagles Dare', I don't feel a wash of history. But playing through
Raffaele Cecco's 1987 'Exolon', a shiver goes through me. Did Rafaelle
expect me to be playing this game in 2000, thirteen years after it was
written? Where is he now? Writing database routines for ICI, working as
a salesman in a business park outside Newbury, or what?
What were people like in 1987, when 'Exolon' was made? I was eleven. Sample-based
dance music was in the ascendancy. Bomb the Bass were not yet popular.
The internet was a military and educational thing for Americans. People
in Britain used PD libraries instead - sending off £1.50 for a six-disc
rendered animation of the Starship Enterprise, for their Commodore Amiga
A500, if they were a bit flash and had a memory expansion. It was like
the internet, but through the post. Prince Charles was still a happily-married
man, people smoked at work and women had to ask for permission before
speaking. Or so I hear. I can't actually remember 1987. When you're eleven,
one year is much like another. What did I do in 1984? Dunno. Probably
had a good old laugh at George Orwell's '1984'. It's odd, in a way. When
you're a kid all the years merge into one because they're much the same,
and they seem to go on forever. And when you're grown-up the years merge
into one because you're much less interesting, and fewer nice things happen
to you. A year is an inhuman timescale. I wonder how prehistoric man knew
about years, given that he or she only lived to be thirty-five or so.
Surely they were unable to defocus their mental mind clocks far enough
for them to see the pattern of the seasons? Living that short a life,
you'd think that their metabolisms would compensate for it by speeding
up, making time seem to go slower.
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"The
Jaguar XK150 DHC is often considered the ugly duckling of the XK family." |
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Like flies.
Flies would never perceive a year, even if they lived that long - and
who is to say that they don't? I can't say I've ever seen a fly die of
old age. Have you? I don't think so. You've never seen an old fly. They
always get killed by predators, or swatted. We should make the government
keep some in jars to see how they live, but this doesn't take into account
the possibility that flies have to recharge their batteries by flying
off to a special place in the sky, somewhere they would be unable to go
to if they were in jars. You'd need to attach a tracking device to the
fly, and they could be really smart and realise this and sacrifice themselves
in order to avoid leading the spooks to their hideaway. I've always wondered
how children's books that feature talking rabbits explain about rabbits
being hit by cars. Do the rabbits have a pow-wow and nominate a brave
fellow rabbit to run in front of a car and stay there, just to make us
humans believe that rabbits are stupid? I don't think they are. They dominate
Australia, ever since Olivia Newton-John took them back to the US of Oz
after doing 'Xanadu', the roller-boogie musical. Nowadays the whole continent
is paved in rabbit-fur, and the rabbits breed upwards, by giving birth
to a new layer of rabbits. They stack several miles tall and then fall
into the ocean, where they dissolve, as rabbits, in common with sheep,
are made out of a flour-like substance that goes well on toast.
I mean, if I was a hunter in my cave, starving and wondering where to
hunt bison, I wouldn't be sitting there trying to map out the pattern
of seasons, I'd be just thinking 'It's cold and damp. I can't remember
what it was like three months ago because I don't know about months'.
This shows just how long the human race had been going before history
started up. What is history? We have a pre-history, but what is history,
and why is it more interesting? You can buy books in shops about history
- I've seen them, they're made by Dorling Kindersley and cost £15.99 and
have pop-up sections with soldiers - but none about prehistory. Why didn't
people write stuff down? So many interesting things must have happened.
One moment we're all apes getting all excited about that monolith, and
the next moment we're farming and doing calendars and having sex in the
missionary position instead of roughly, from behind, and women probably
have more rights as they're good at sewing and a hunter is nothing without
a mysterious cloak with which to bewilder and bewitch the wildebeest.
Heck, Batman didn't wear a loincloth, and he certainly didn't go naked
in the nasty streets of Gotham. You can hardly terrify criminals if you're
wearing no clothes, unless you're an Alien from the film of the same name,
although then you would find it hard to pretend to be Bruce Wayne. You'd
turn up at his house and kill Alfred and Robin and everybody else who
arrived, and people would notice a pattern of alien infestation spreading
into the surrounding countryside from Wayne manor. Then you'd be for it.
The police would come around and arrest you, with special acid-proof handcuffs
made out of pottery.
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"Then
I wouldn't have to kill people. That would be good." |
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Unless history
was like in the film '2001', which was bizarre - one moment there's an
ape, and the very next moment we're flying through space. I'm not au fait
with all of history, I didn't really pay attention much in school... but
that can't be right, can it? There was Napoleon and Ferdinand Marcos,
the guy who sailed around Africa. And Henry the Eighth. All that things
went in between and '2001' seemed to suggest that they didn't happen.
Or perhaps they were fiction, I don't know. The Scarlet Pimpernel was
made-up, wasn't it / he? Like the Pink Panther, I think that the Pimpernel
didn't actually appear in the film - it was a bloke who was a criminal,
or the diamond, and there was David Niven. David Niven should have opened
a charity shop. The slogan would have been:
DAVID NIVEN - HE BE GIVIN'
To the poor, obviously. And those in need of ceramic mermaids, the
better to smuggle them through customs, like those guns from 'Die Hard
2', the ones made out of pottery. Glock something. Their slogan should
be:
GLOCK POTTERY GUNS - GOOD FOR KILN'
It's a pun on 'killing', obviously. Although the Army don't want to mention
that, I've seen their adverts - 'Will I be turned into a killing machine'
is answered with 'No', although I suspect most potential recruits would
prefer the answer to be 'Yes! You'll learn how to kill people just by
looking at them in a funny way, like Cyclops from the X-Men'. That would
be good. I could commit a massacre by standing on Oxford street and gazing
at the people as they walk by. It would make it hard to have normal human
relationships, though. I'd be unable to look at the person I was talking
to and I might end up marrying an ugly woman. I could feel her face with
my hands, but what if she has an unattractive tattoo? You can't feel tattoos,
I don't think. Unless they're slightly sticky or sweat less. I know that
you can feel different inks on a magazine page, but I don't think you
could use that kind of knowledge to find out if somebody is attractive
or not. You could try asking somebody to draw a picture of them, and then
you could look at the picture. Yes, that would be good. You could attract
a camera to your face that records pictures taken from the front of your
head, they'd be like eyes, but with a tiny time delay and
freeze-frame
and low-light magnification. Then I wouldn't have to kill people. That
would be good. I will go to sleep tonight thinking about that. It'll prey
on my mind as I roll over to let the snot drain into the lower nostril.
I hate it when it just sticks there and I get uncomfortable. I like lying
on my right-hand side. It's great.
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Few Spectrum
games were written with history in mind, and it's odd to look back and
see which games remained famous or influential. Hudsonsoft's 1983 'Eric
and the Floaters' was obscure even in 1983, but has a little place in
modern popular culture as the first of the 'Super Bomberman' games - only
Geoff Crammond's 'Sentinel' has made the twelve-year jump from Spectrum
to PlayStation. On the other hand, Automata's contemporary 'Deus Ex Machina',
an ambitious, 'Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy'-esque epic with a synchronised
taped soundtrack - featuring no less than Ian Dury, Frankie Howerd and
John Pertwee, no less - rings so few mental bells that one has to dig
out a screenshot to prove that, yes, Frankie Howerd was in a computer
game. Yes he was.
(And some games should be famous, but aren't. After introducing isometric
3D to the Spectrum with 1983's 'Ant Attack', Sandy White did the same
for filled polygons with 1985's 'I of the Mask'. The game itself wasn't
much fun to play, but predated Incentive's 'Driller' by two years. And
you'd think that more people would realise that 'Rainbow Six' is just
a flashier riff on Ariolasoft's 1986 'They Stole a Million', but no. And
both 'Kwah' and 'Redhawk' were mighty fine comic-book adventures that
deserve more than blank stares when you shout their names out loud on
the underground.)
What dates a game? Old Spectrum games are usually so abstract as to be
timeless. Sure, the system font and user-defined graphics date the game
from a technical point of view, but there's very little to date the games
culturally. 'Chuckie Egg' contained no insights into contemporary egg
farming, nor did it accurately portray rural life as it was in 1983. The
only thing to anchor 'Manic Miner' in the early-80s is a room entitled
'Skylab Landing Bay', in which NASA Skylab space stations crash to Earth,
something which was fresh in the memory in 1983. That, and the fact that
the main character is a miner - nowadays he would be working as a telephone
operator. With sci-fi shoot-em-ups outnumbering social commentaries a
hundred to one, only a few games featured real-world situations - driving
games, for example, usually took place in featureless wastelands, or featured
carefully-altered track names (Psion's 'Chequered Flag' allowed you to
drive for 'Ferreti' or 'McFaster'). Those that allowed you to drive real
cars usually gave you a choice between a Porsche 911, a Ferrari 512, or
a Lamborghini Countach - cars which are still stylish nowadays.
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"Will
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(One exception
was CRL's 1985 'Formula 1', which, presumably without the knowledge of
the FIA (if it even existed then), allowed you to manage long-defunct
F1 teams Brabham, Lotus and Renault. Amusingly, both Ayrton Senna and
Nigel Mansell are part of the b-list of cheaper drivers, and everybody
else on the list (including Alain Prost and Nelson Piquet) has long since
retired or died, or, in the case of Martin Brundle, moved into the afterlife
of commentating.)
In the celebrity stakes, games programmers occupy a niche somewhere below
special-effects technicians or motor car designers. A few are famous if
you're an enthusiast, but not even the gaming glitteratti - Jon Romero
or Pete Molyneux, to pick two names - will ever be photographed going
to the premiere of a new film with Minnie Driver hanging off their arm.
It's not that programmers do not lack charisma - they are normal people
like you or I. It's not as if auteurs are obsolete in the modern era,
either. Good computer games still tend to be created by one or two clever
people working on their own, and have an impact inversely proportional
to their frequency. Whilst most modern games are constructed from bits
of other games, and rely for their appeal on impressive 3D effects created
by a battery of coders, the occasional 'Tetris' or 'Vib-Ribbon' would
have been destroyed by excess manpower. 'Homeworld' looks very nice, and
may well have some stunningly-attractive code behind it, but it was supposed
to be a new game, and wasn't. It had new components, but it was just a
normal car with a new body. Okay, cars are all much the same, and they
don't have to reinvent the wheel to be good, but computer games are not
cars. I found a webpage that has a list of things that computer games
are not, and cars was quite high on the list. BMX bikes and David Roth
from Van Halen were lower down the list. Computer games are not rats.
They are not fast-food. They are not September, the month.
No, in the end, programmers remain obscure because fame is a full-time
job, one that doesn't leave any room for programming. Beyond her make-up
routine, gym sessions and daily smiling, Minnie Driver doesn't have to
do anything else to remain famous, whereas a Jon Romero that didn't actually
write computer games would just be another goateed American with a fast
car, a whiney voice, and a habit of ending every sentence with 'you know'.
Then again, the old masters often paid assistants to paint the boring,
mechanical bits of their painting - second unit painters, as it were.
Could Jon Romero retire from games programming, swan around being famous,
and occasionally call into the office to add his signature to whatever
opus Ion Storm have produced that month? Who knows?
Way back in the 8-bit era, the easiest way to be a star programmer was
to have unusual hair - Matthew Smith, author of 'Manic Miner' and 'Jet
Set Willy', famously had voluminous, black, curly hair, Jeff Minter had
long, blonde, curly hair, and David Braben, author of 'Elite', had a deeply
1983 moptop that went well with a tank-top and drainpipe trousers
and a
degree in engineering. And there was Geoff Crammond, the most visible
today - I have no idea what he looked like in the 8-bit heyday, but he
probably had a big, bushy beard. He was never a personality, though. He
was always there, churning out top-quality games, but he never seemed
to catch the imagination in the same way as Jeff Minter. Minter produced
a bunch of mostly unmemorable shoot-em-ups in the 80s, but his obsession
with Llamas, messianic devotion to 'Defender', and the stunningly brilliant
'Llamatron' ensured him a kind of immortality, the kind that dies out
after a decade or so. That, and the habit he had of latching on to lost
causes, from the Konix Multisystem to the Atari ST, to the Atari Jaguar,
and finally to the Ozric Tentacles.
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Although things
improved as time went on, most Spectrum games programmers were obscure
simply because they were either not credited, or, in the pre-Internet
age, all the audience knew of them was their name. To take an example
- Jonathan Smith. He wrote 'Cobra' and 'Terra Cresta' and lots of other
Ocean games, and often wrote his name as 'Jonathan Smiff', with the letters
reversed. That's the sum total of my knowledge of Jonathan Smith. Today,
he could be living two streets away, he could be dead, or he could be
the head of a government taskforce on unemployment - I don't know, and
I have no way of finding out. He'll grow old and die without knowing that
I've just written a paragraph of text about him, and when he passes away
only his immediate family and friends will know or care. He's probably
a bad example, though. 'Cobra' is quite well-loved. But then again, he
was British. There are plenty of web sites about American games programmers
- if you browse the internet for long enough you start to believe that
the Spectrum was only popular in Norway, and that the Western world used
the Apple 2, various TRS and Atari machines, and the Commodore 64.
So what about Keith Purkiss, the only writer of Interceptor's 1985 'Tales
of the Arabian Knights' who warrants more than an initial on the title
screen? Are you out there, somewhere? Are you a pseudonym? Do you even
remember writing the game, or are you trying to forget? How much money
did you get? Lots, a salary, or £2,153? Where is Interceptor, for that
matter? There really is no way of finding out. In the same way that a
1976 1.4 litre Ford Escort Popular is now rarer than a 1932
Bentley, the C-list
of software houses are now long-dead and forgotten because nobody cared
enough about them to remember them. There were loads about, and at the
time, we thought that they would go on forever - when they stopped, we
didn't notice. Everything that surrounded us as children is gone, because,
as children, we were only interested in novelty. Some of us grow out of
it, and some of us don't. I don't know which condition is best. They are
probably the same.
We're made of mud, blood and ephemera, but we forget all this and think
that we're made of momentous events, and world wars, and meteorites smashing
into continents, but we're not. We try to ignore the mud and blood and
we forget the ephemera. One man painted the roof of the Sistine chapel,
and we use it as an example of humanity; all men go to the toilet, but
we try to ignore it. If aliens were to base their knowledge of us from
films and television, they would be convinced that our lives are spent
having sex, running away from men with guns, making wisecracks during
the Korean war and constantly getting in trouble with Grant Mitchell,
whereas we spend a third of our lives asleep and most of the rest waiting
for other things to happen. So it is with computer games. I think of 'Exolon'
and I think of firing rocket grenades at bizarre alien flora. I don't
think of the time spent looking for the tape, or loading the game, or
redefining the keys or reading a few pages of '2000AD' whilst the game
is paused. We forget all this, and our lives are streamlined and turned
into a dramatic sequence of events in our head, made more exciting by
our abhorrence of trivia.
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"Batman
didn't wear a loincloth." |
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One of my
favourite old Spectrum games is 'Quazatron'. It was written by a man called
Steve Turner. I had noticed his name on a few other games, some of which
were quite good, and I know what he looked like because 'Sinclair User'
ran an interview with him once. But, as with his peers, he seemed to fade
from view as the 8-bit machines died out. It's hard to relate how glad
I was when I spotted the name 'Steve Turner' in the credits for Geoff
Crammond's 'Grand Prix 2'. It might not be the same Steve Turner, though.
I don't think there's a guild for programmers. If there was, the world
would be a very different place. They would have all the power, and we
would be their serfs. I can't imagine that it would be a particularly
nice world. I guess that's why they don't have a guild - the government
must keep them under constant watch, and whenever they get the idea of
joining up to overthrow the people in marketing, Jack Straw broadcasts
piercing whistles into the transmitters implanted in their heads, just
like in 'Harrison Bergeron' by that science-fiction author.
Andrew Hewson, Dominic Robson, Andrew Braybrook, they're all gone, off
to the world of consulting. Rob Hubbard, the man who wrote 'Thalamusic',
probably writes the bleeps that microwave ovens emit when they've finished
heating something up. Pete Cooke, the man whose 'Tau Ceti' popularised
the phrase 'day : - sunset in 027 m', soldiered on into the 16-bit era
with 'Tower of Babel', and probably wandered off to Arizona with his arcane
knowledge of 3D graphics to build a new civilisation out in the desert,
one based entirely on pyramids and cubes, and policed by robot flying
saucers. There were comparatively few interesting 16-bit programmers,
and no b-list. Nowadays, you can count the interesting games programmers
on the fingers of two hands. Pete Molyneux, who doesn't even program stuff
any more, Jon Romero, who ditto, plus the guy who wrote 'Super Mario Brothers'
and the guy who wrote 'Um Jammer Lammy', and pick some others to take
the place of the other fingers. I should mention that I don't mean 'programmers
who program interesting games', I mean 'interesting programmers', the
sort of programmers that have strong opinions, although in the case of
the guy who wrote 'Super Mario Brothers' and the guy who wrote 'Vib Ribbon'
and for that matter Jon Romero, I don't actually mean that at all. That's
because I'm writing this in one big rush, straight from my head onto the
page. It's like prog rock - I don't have an editor, so I'm just going
to go on and on and on, not caring whether I'm being boring.
The break between the days of the 8-bit micros and the games machines
that came after is comparable with that of the shift from silent movies
to sound, more than sixty years before. In the decade during which the
Sinclair Spectrum was produced, it was quite possible for a person to
master the machine, to know everything there was to know about the Spectrum's
hardware and quirks, to squeeze every last byte of memory from ever last
buffer. The 16-bit era lasted as long, but shifted five years forwards
in time, so that it seemed as if the 16-bit computers had finally squashed
the 8-bit micros, only to succumb to consoles and the PC a short while
later. Lengthier development times and the attendant increased costs meant
that many smaller software houses couldn't make the jump to 16-bit games
production effectively, and those that survived were wiped out by consoles
and piracy. The days when Codemasters could churn out a dozen new titles
every three months were over. The possible saviour, the Spectrum-esque
Game Boy, was owned by Nintendo, who strictly controlled development for
the console. Whilst Ocean might be able to afford a license to develop
for the platform, two programmers working from a bedroom could not. Emulation
might have been a solution, if it had been available earlier.
With a few, abortive exceptions, games consoles came from Japan, and the
larger Japanese and US markets usually received the lion's share of development
equipment and official licenses. None of the British software houses seemed
particularly interested in consolidation, and the lack of disposable income
and delays in hardware supply meant that there was never going to be an
Apogee-esque explosion of state-of-the-art PC shareware titles created
by the aforementioned two programmers working from a bedroom. Something
as simple as the fact that consoles and the 16-bit machines lacked a built-in
programming language stifled experimentation with programming - the explosion
of PD titles that emerged after the release of Amiga games-orientated
programming language AMOS showed that there was the will, but not enough
of it to learn C.
So all the individuals, the Steve Turners and David Brabens, the Charlie
Chaplins, they're all gone now, except for the ones that are still around,
like David Braben. Good thing or bad thing, or just 'thing'? I dunno.
Films are much better than they were in the past, and they're all made
by dozens of people - 'Wild Wild West' had thirty different people going
over the script, from writers to producers to the stars and probably the
gaffer, whatever he does (I think it's something to do with set construction
but don't quote me), and it was much better than 'Assault on Precinct
13', which was basically all done by John Carpenter. Sure, the latter
film was quite exciting, but 'Wild Wild West' had a giant spider, and,
best of all, the baddies were women, which meant that it was one of the
few mainstream Hollywood films to feature Will Smith killing lots of women
- a sure-fire box-office draw, and something which appeals to me as I
find it hard to be natural enough to attract friends, I just put them
off by trying too hard to be interesting.
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